Key Takeaways The married co-founders teamed up with an engineer to launch White Elephant Online in November 2020.
Here’s how they grew the flexible, seasonal side hustle into a “quasi full-time business” eyeing its next growth chapter.
In the throes of the pandemic in August 2020, David Mancarella was working remotely as a director of product management at a property-tech firm based in New York City when he and his co-workers wondered what might happen to their holiday party tradition. The office played white elephant, the gamified and often humorous gift swap, every year.
“ I was like, Well, there must be a way to play white elephant virtually,” Mancarella tells Entrepreneur. “I’m sure that exists. But of course, after the call, I started Googling and realized it did not exist. Because it didn’t really need to exist up to that point. People would just play in person. It wasn’t really something people were trying to do virtually until the pandemic hit.”
Mancarella’s wife, Leliah Kishbaugh, recalls her husband announcing his new business idea at their home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where they’d moved just weeks before the pandemic struck. She notes that it wasn’t the first time he’d come up with an idea for a business — but it was the first time he’d come up with one that didn’t exist already.
Related: ‘I Just Hustled’: She Earned More Than $300,000 Wrapping Gifts Last Year — and It All Started With a Side Hustle
A couple of days later, Mancarella reached out to Andrzej Brynczka, an engineer he’d worked with, to run the project by him. Brynczka was on board, and the side hustle came together fairly quickly after that. Mancarella and Kishbaugh wanted to launch the business ahead of Thanksgiving to make the most of the holiday season.
Image Credit: Courtesy of White Elephant Online. Leliah Kishbaugh and David Mancarella.
That was the official start of their new business: White Elephant Online.
Kishbaugh, who worked in finance before starting her own real estate development company and co-founding the womenswear brand NILETA, admits that she gravitates toward business names that “are a little bit punchier,” but in this case, her husband’s preference for a “straightforward, optimized” name paid off.
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